This blog post is excerpted from The Christian Faith: A Lutheran Exposition, second edition, by Theodore J. Hopkins and Robert Kolb.
God used the many and varied voices of the prophets to convey His message to His people (Hebrews 1:1), and He spoke the final, complete Word through His Son (Hebrews 1:1–2). His Word, His message for us, came in human flesh, as Jesus of Nazareth, who claimed all authority in heaven and earth because He is the author of life and the author of new life (Matthew 28:18).
God Speaks in a Language His Creation Knows
Human language lies at the heart of our existence. It marks us as the creatures we are, distinct in our own persons and cultures by the way we talk, yet able to communicate across linguistic lines as we learn one another’s languages. Human creatures may, indeed, have feelings too deep for words. They may enjoy music and the arts without being able to express verbally what they feel. But we talk, even to ourselves. As we think, we usually organize life verbally, in propositions with subjects and verbs, implied if not stated, and certainly we cannot relate our precise thoughts to others without words. The full enjoyment of our humanity depends on verbalization. God knew that. He designed human creatures that way. Hence, God not only acted out His love in human history, but He also explained His actions through the prophets. More than that, He spoke His love directly to His people through the prophets’ mouths. These prophetic voices have been made “more fully confirmed” in the record of the Holy Scripture. This prophetic word enlightens human hearts and brings the dawning of the day to lives that lay in darkness (2 Peter 1:19–21) until the true Light of the World made flesh enlightened humankind (John 1:9). This Word, Jesus Christ, represents the culmination of all God’s talk (Hebrews 1:1–2).
God Speaks to Us Through Scripture
God’s revelation of Himself—in human flesh and in the inspired Scriptures—addresses us directly. God does not merely talk about Himself, giving us information about His character and work. God’s address focuses on the relationship between Himself and His human creatures who have rebelled against Him. God thus confronts us, speaking to us in first-person, primary discourse, in order to draw us into relationship with Him by faith. God promises: “You are My child.” He proclaims: “I am your God.” He gushes: “I forgive you all your sins. I love you.” In His voice, conveyed in the incarnate person of God, Jesus of Nazareth, in the pages of the Bible, and in the preaching and sharing of Christians with one another, such statements verbalize God’s presence and power among us, according to His promise (Matthew 18:20; 28:18–20; Acts 1:8; Romans 10:8–10, 17). In the words of His Gospel He has placed the power to save (Romans 1:16).
At the same time, we must be careful not to think of God’s Gospel address as purely emotional, lacking content. To be sure, God’s direct address usually creates an emotional response in those who are convicted of their sin and are freed from guilt and shame through Jesus’ death on the cross. But the Gospel is more than a word that comforts. Faith involves both the emotional embrace of God’s promise as well as its content, expressed in propositions, in subjects and verbs. In fact, God’s promise and His commands cannot be conveyed apart from propositions, propositions that introduce the person of Jesus Christ to others, tell the story of what Jesus has done, express His love for His people, and inform us of the Spirit-filled life in the Gospel. …
These human words are not magical code or mystical nonsense that must be deciphered into God’s Word. They are just plain, ordinary human language, as Jesus of Nazareth was a plain, ordinary human creature. These easily apprehensible words, however, cannot be known and trusted as God’s own word of command and promise without the gift of the Holy Spirit. Although the meaning of the words can be ascertained by all, the words cannot be accepted as God’s voice and address without the Spirit’s gift of trust. … This lack of comprehension may be partly a human problem—creatures will never be able to get their minds completely around their Creator—but it is far more a problem of sin. Sinners resist an unpredictable God whom we cannot control, and we refuse the free goodness of God who intends to rescue us from our sin and restore us to His family.
God Addresses His Children in Law and Gospel
God’s message for human creatures comes in the forms of Law and Gospel. His design for human life takes shape in commands. His gift of new life for human creatures is conveyed through His promise to be our God, His promise to regard and keep us as His children. Even those who have not been given the gift of faith can make rather accurate guesses about His design for human life. The Law speaks to fallen sinners through any number of human experiences. … But God gives access to the Gospel, to His fatherly and gracious intention for fallen sinners, only through His intended messengers: in the specific revelation of His incarnate Son, Jesus Christ; in the inspired words of the prophets and apostles—collected in Holy Scripture—as they give testimony to God’s love in Christ; and in the words Christians use to convey this proclamation of His love to others by the Spirit.
God’s specific revelation of Himself comes in personal and propositional forms. He speaks to us on a human level, through human creatures and in the human language we understand and use for sustaining daily existence. He speaks nonetheless of our sin and His grace, a subject higher than our ability to comprehend it. He tells us what we need to know—though not all that we would like to know—about Himself. He speaks to save.
God Has a Name and a History
North Americans want to be on a first-name basis with everyone; they have begun to call God, for the first time in the history of the church, “Yahweh.” He also goes by the name “Jesus, the Christ.” Unlike Yahweh, this name is quite clear. It tells us that God has come in human flesh as the promised Messiah, the anointed Rescuer and King of Israel. In human history, God claimed a name by which we could speak to Him and about Him. God claimed a name among us so that we could know Him not as an idea but as a person with a history on earth.
Hence, when God spoke to Moses at the bush, He not only gave Moses the divine name, Yahweh, He also named Himself in terms of His promises and personal relationships with His people. He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Exodus 3:6). We often talk about God in terms of His attributes or His character—as, for example, the all-powerful one who is present everywhere—but God names Himself in terms of His history and His promises. God identifies Himself as the one who called Abraham, who promised to be his God and bless all people of the world through him. God identifies Himself as the one who committed to the deceiver, to Jacob, and to his descendants. God identifies Himself to us as the one come in Jesus, promised to deliver all from sin, death, and the devil through the cross and empty tomb of the Messiah. This history is not accidental or incidental to God’s identity, but it is God’s history among humanity by which He has identified Himself.
God Has a Personhood Through Christ
Some modern people want to believe that the ultimate power of the universe is not personal but rather a generic, divine force. This denial of the personhood of God may spring from human discouragement with their own persons. If I have made a wreck of my own person and my own personal relationships, I will hope for something more in my deliverer than a mere person. Others believe that to ascribe personhood to God is to belittle Him. God must be bigger than mere personhood. Ascribing Him personhood is anthropomorphizing Him: reducing Him to human form.
Others shy away from acknowledging God’s personhood, however, because they properly recognize that the personal is superior to the impersonal. They want to contend with a divine force rather than a divine person because they sense that impersonality may even the odds between the human and the divine. Encapsulating the divine in the form of a force may tame its power. … Perhaps we strive against the depersonalization of God because we suspect that depersonalizing Him depersonalizes us. Reducing Him from person to force reduces us.
Of course, God “reduced” Himself to human form in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. He is the original anthropomorphizer. It is not because we cast Him in our own image that we think of Him as a person. We are only persons because God is a person. His person existed before our persons could be conceived, and we are persons because He made us in His image (Genesis 1:27; Colossians 3:10).
Thus He is the person who is, always. He is the first and the last. Before and beside Him there is no other God, no other origin and originator of all (Isaiah 44:6; 45:5). He graciously entered into the fallen world to be the God of Israel and save sinners through His eternally begotten Son, Jesus of Nazareth, and by His Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son. He not only deserves ultimate trust as Designer and Creator of human life (Genesis 1:27–2:25), but He also creates that trust in us, giving Himself to us in the material world of history and giving us a word of promise to grasp in faith. He is the only reliable source of ultimate identity, security, and meaning for human creatures. He is God.
Scripture: ESV®.
Blog post adapted from The Christian Faith: A Lutheran Exposition © 2024 Theodore J. Hopkins and Robert Kolb, published by Concordia Publishing House. All rights reserved.
Learn more about the ways God speaks to His people and read other insightful theological topics in The Christian Faith.
